No Taxation without Participation: Making governments more open and accountable

(Cross posted from the Knight Blog)
By Beth Simone Noveck and Stefaan G. Verhulst

Government was on everyone’s mind this week, and not in a good way. A Pew survey shows that the majority of Americans dislikes or hates doing taxes, calling it time consuming and stressful. That’s not suprising, given that the Internal Revenue Service’s website features more than 400 tax forms to download.
It’s not just the complexity of the tax filing process that makes it painful; it’s the missed opportunity for participation. The tax system’s design dates back to a time when the centralization of information collection and decision-making was viewed as necessary.  Yet even today, besides voting in annual elections, people have almost no way to direct how government spends their money. There is still no feedback mechanism for citizens to share —in real time or at tax time — how their contribution might help provide public goods or solve societal challenges. Governments, too, miss out on citizens’ expertise.
How can we re-imagine how we collect and decide how to spend taxes, and by doing so, make government more effective and accountable? Moreover, how can these lessons strengthen the relation between, and among, citizens and the governance institutions?
These are the kinds of questions we are seeking to start answering at the GovLab ‘Experiment’ a two-day event where participants work together to identify and overcome the impediments that limit citizen engagement and prevent more open and agile institutions. The GovLab is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and housed at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Here’s where we are starting the conversation:
Today, advances in science and technology, used widely in the private sector, provide many opportunities to innovate how we govern. Consider the following possibilities that would change how we track and allocate taxes, not to mention learn from the information collected:

• Radical strides have been made in developing tools for articulating new and more diverse ideas from a distributed population. Imagine asking all of us for ways to simplify and improve the tax system. Companies do it. The “My Starbucks Idea” website asks coffee customers how to improve the company’s products and services. Dell Computers did something similar online with its Idea Storm website. And Netflix gave away a million dollars to the researchers who could improve its recommendation system.  Parts of government are starting to catch on.
• Leveraging  the increased availability of third party data, advances in data analytics and visualizations, the IRS could create dashboards so that the public and policymakers could assess the well-being of America’s neighborhoods in real time. The United States Patent Office in Washington, D.C. instituted such a dashboard system to track performance and timeliness of their agencies, giving officials and interested communities better insight into the state of patenting and innovation in the economy.
• By opening up data that is legally public, such as the 1.5 million tax returns of tax-exempt organizations, researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators could mash it up to do comparisons and analyses across different organizations. This investigation would make it possible to recognize fraud early, anticipate other abuses and target enforcement more effectively. Many public benefits have come from “opening up” government data. When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published its database of hospital infection rates, Microsoft and Google were able to mash it up with mapping data to create an application that shows infection rates for local hospitals across the country. This tool readily allows anyone — from the investigative journalist to the parent of a sick child — to see which hospitals are safest.
• New collaboration platforms such as those in use by the Kickstarter could empower the public to have more influence over how public programs  get funded and their budgets allocated. It was this  “crowd” that funded the building of a skyscraper  through individual contributions in Colombia. Organizations like Brickstarter in Finland or Spacehive in the UK are currently applying the crowdfunding model to public works projects including park cleanups —services traditionally paid for exclusively through public funds. Imagine if the IRS offered a searchable list of government or grant-funded projects that people could supplement through crowdfunding. New collaboration technologies are also making it possible to organize “participatory budgeting” experiments, and governments in Chicago, New York and Brazil, among other places, have empowered citizens simply by asking them to work together to direct how taxpayer dollars are spent.

We live in an era of unprecedented technological advance with ingenuous and hopeful new discoveries not simply for improving how we collect and spend taxes, but for achieving clean energy, eradicating disease, achieving greater wellness and improving schools. We have the tools and the social scientific insights for how to put them to good use, to source new and better ideas whether from data or from people. But we lack institutions that can quickly discover, recognize, implement and scale innovative solutions to these, and other, problems.
For true transformation, we need more experimentation and analysis. For instance, if only we knew…

• how to find the people who know the most about a topic.
• how to produce data visualizations that motivate citizens to solve problems.
• how to define problems and ask questions to engage meaningfully with citizens.
• how to elicit what people in communities care about the most.
• how to create smarter cities from the bottom up.
• how to make government data more accessible and valuable for businesses and the public.

The GovLab Experiment is convening researchers and practitioners in the nascent field of institutional innovation. Two hundred thinkers and doers are here in New York from all over the globe to work with government change agents, including the Minister of Youth and ICT of Rwanda, the Director of the Office of Analytics of New York City, and the head of Innovation for Britain’s National Health Service. Together, we’ll be rapidly prototyping solutions to challenging issues, including how government data can be made more valuable for the public and how problems and questions can be defined and put forth in a way that meaningfully engages citizens.
Follow The Experiment online, including our live blog, at #govlab on Twitter, and http://thegovlab.org